By Michelle Alexander - March 12, 2010

There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in [Obama's] appearance on the world stage...If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land...Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

By MATT SIEGRFIRED - March 3, 2010

I was interested to see how the world media would pronounce on the very well developed and tolerated, if legally ambiguous, British Columbia marijuana mores...B.C. is a byword for quality herb and, relatively, chill enforcement with weed joining health care, curling and community theater as signposts of Canada’s more civilized society despite all of the similarities between them and us, the barbarians next door. With a wink and a nod Canada, more or less, let the heads alone during the games with only positive effects all around it would seem.

By ANTHONY PAPA - January 29-31, 2010

Why would anyone in their right mind plead out to a ten year minimum sentence? In the U.S., this type of behavior is standard in procuring drug convictions of low level drug offenders who wind up doing more time than a murderer or rapist...Thanks to the war on drugs, and especially mandatory minimum sentencing policies, average drug offenders...are sentenced to extraordinary amounts of time in prison.

Mexico has been carried in this way to the status of a leading “emerging market.” Under the guidance of international financial supervision, and with the help of a safe and supervised U.S. Treasury debt policy, the country has become a favorite object of speculative foreign money capital. It stands or falls in this respect with the trend of confidence that the foreign monetary investors give or take away from the country...

By MARTHA ROSENBERG - January 5, 2010

It's no secret [anti-psychotic medications are] an institutional goldmine for the drug industry who exacted $5 million for one year of atypical drugs at Western State mental hospital in Tacoma, [Washington]. Many states have sued over the cost of atypical [anti-psychotics], especially the cost of treating the diabetes and metabolic disorders they cause, which has decimated Medicaid budgets.

By MARTHA ROSENBERG - December 24, 2009

High profile suicides...occurred in 2009 prompting the [US Food & Drug Administration] to add black box warnings to the asthma drugs Singulair, Accolate and Zyflo, the anti-smoking drugs Chantix and Zyban and authorities to question the antidepressants given to 80 percent of Iraq war veterans with post traumatic stress disorder...The open secret of industry subsidized journal articles...came under Congressional investigation in 2009--as did the drug industry ties of faux grassroots groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness...

By NORM KENT - December 17, 2009

For years I have been writing that no one dies by smoking pot. Today, I write sadly, that a young man in Florida died because he choked to death on it...His name was Andrew Grande, and he died this week in a popular Spring Break town, Panama City Beach, because Prohibition is alive in Florida.

By Glen Ford - December 07, 2009

If you're looking for the chief kingpin in the Afghanistan heroin trade, it's the United States. The American mission has devolved to a Mafioso-style arrangement that poisons every military and political alliance entered into by the U.S. and its puppet government in Kabul. It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists, marked for death or capture.

Play aims to reduce stigma of mental illness one show at a time. Courtesy Digital Journal by KJ Mullins

By Malalai Joya - November 12, 2009

Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media...We are sandwiched between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces of the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban and the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai.

By MARTHA ROSENBERG - November 4, 2009

CMEs (or Continuing Medical Education courses) are sponsored by drug makers, "taught" by industry-funded specialists and bracketed by pop-up drugs ads which sometimes occlude the text you're reading...[D]octors are required to sit through the canned message like a time-share presentation and answer a quiz just to keep their state licenses and sometimes insurance policies.

By Jeremy Kuzmarov - Znet

While [Cannabis Advocate Marc] Emery and thousands of other non-violent offenders have been left to rot in the North American penal-industrial complex, Mr. Karzai and his gangster associates remain free to acquire lavish mansions and are immune from prosecution owing to their utility to Western imperial interests.

Vancouver, October 29, 2009 – The B.C. College of Pharmacists and the B.C. Attorney General have taken legal positions with Pivot Legal Society against infamous pharmacist and hotel owner George Wolsey, who earlier this year evicted two tenants who refused to buy methadone from him.

By DAVE LINDORFF - October 28, 2009

...[W]here the US goes, the drug trade soon follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency...Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back “zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job, should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.